Bucknell University Press

The park will be renovated to improve its facilities as well as feature art that celebrates Johnson’s life. There will be detailed signage outlining the activism Johnson did in leading the Gay Liberation movement, including her participation in the 1969 Stonewall Uprising and her work establishing a shelter to house LGBTQ+ youth rejected by their families.

In his announcement, Governor Cuomo said, “Too often, the marginalized voices that have pushed progress forward in New York and across the country go unrecognized, making up just a fraction of our public memorials and monuments.” He added, “Marsha P. Johnson was one of the early leaders of the LGBTQ+ movement, and is only now getting the acknowledgement she deserves. Dedicating this state park for her, and installing public art telling her story, will ensure her memory and her work fighting for equality lives on.”

Just across state lines in New Jersey, in Johnson’s home town of Elizabeth, officials similarly announced plans to dedicate a monument to Johnson. It will be located near Elizabeth’s City Hall, in an area used to “recognize trailblazers, pioneers, and international patriots.”

Johnson’s nephew, Al Michaels, is quoted as saying, “Marsha is needed now. Here we have the Black Lives Matter movement and the Trans Lives Matter movement. We have the same thing happening to people today, as far as police brutality.” He continued, “And as far as equality and justice, and Marsha was at the forefront of all that in 1969. And here it is 2020, and we’re in exactly the same place. And Marsha’s spirit has come to guide us through this fight, [like] she did back at Stonewall.”

In celebration of Marsha P. Johnson’s life’s work but also in somber acknowledgement of how far we still have yet to go, the Press wants to celebrate her by highlighting some of our recent books with themes that share her enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ history and rights.

Click on a book’s title to be brought to its landing page on our publishing partners’ websites, either Rutgers University Press or Rowman & Littlefield.

1.) Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema
Andrés Lima-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

Pedro Almódovar may have helped put queer Iberian cinema on the map, but there are also multitudes of other LGBTQ filmmakers from Catalonia, Portugal, Castile, Galicia, and the Basque Country who have made the Peninsula one of the world’s most vital sources for queer film. Together, they have produced a cinema whose expressions of queer desire have challenged the region’s conservative religious and family values, while intervening in vital debates about politics, history, and nation.

Iberian Queer Cinema is a unique collection that offers in-depth analyses of fifteen different films, each by a different director, produced in the region over the past fifty years, from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s La residencia (The House That Screamed, 1970) to João Pedro Rodrigues’ O ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016). Together, they show how queer Iberian cinema has responded to historical traumas ranging from the AIDS crisis to the repressive and homophobic Franco regime. Yet they also explore how these films gesture towards a more fluid understanding of sexuality, gender, and national identity. This book will thus give readers a new appreciation for both the cultural diversity of Iberia and the richness of its moving and thought-provoking queer cinema.

2.) Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Literature
Jason S. Farr

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

3.) Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
Frieda Ekotto

Don’t Whisper Too Much was the first work of fiction by an African writer to present love stories between African women in a positive light. Bona Mbella is the second. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay, African women, Ekotto comments upon larger issues that affect these women, including Africa as a post-colonial space, the circulation of knowledge, and the question of who writes history. In recounting the beauty and complexity of relationships between women who love women, Ekotto inscribes these stories within African history, both past and present. Don’t Whisper Too Much follows young village girl Ada’s quest to write her story on her own terms, outside of heteronormative history. Bona Mbella focuses upon the life of a young woman from a poor neighborhood in an African megalopolis. And “Panè,” a love story, brings the many themes from Don’t Whisper Much and Bona Mbella together as it explores how emotional and sexual connections between women have the power to transform, even in the face of great humiliation and suffering. Each story in the collection addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency.

4.) The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence
A.W. Barnes

The Dark Eclipse is a book of personal essays in which author A.W. Barnes seeks to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother, Mike. Using source documentation—police report, autopsy, suicide note, and death certificate—the essays explore Barnes’ relationship with Mike and their status as gay brothers raised in a large conservative family in the Midwest. In addition, the narrative traces the brothers’ difficult relationship with their father, a man who once studied to be a Trappist monk before marrying and fathering eight children. Because of their shared sexual orientation, Andrew hoped he and Mike would be close, but their relationship was as fraught as the author’s relationship with his other brothers and father. While the rest of the family seems to have forgotten about Mike, who died in 1993, Barnes has not been able to let him go. This book is his attempt to do so.

5.) Representing Queer and Transgender Identity: Fluid Bodies in the Hispanic Caribbean and Beyond
Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. These works demonstrate how transgender and queer bodies redefine belonging, particularly national belonging, through global movement and community making practices. Through these genres, the text follows the movement of transgender and queer identities from textual spaces to spaces of the body. The gradual movement from text to body—as it occurs in these genres—demonstrates the variety of representational strategies that dismantle binary readings of gender, sexuality, and nationality. 

Transgender visibility is a pressing social issue, and today’s transgender moment will be a social and political necessity for years to come. Of particular importance are representations of transgender and/or queer people of color. The field of transgender representation is growing, and Fluid Bodies adds to the visibility of transgender and queer identity from the Hispanic Caribbean. By investigating the relationship between novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art, Fluid Bodies emphasizes how each work plays on and against the separation of language and the body, and how Hispanic Caribbean authors and artists represent transgender and queer identity in order to redefine cultural and national belonging in various geographic spaces.

Bucknell University’s series Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850 invites expressions of interest for essays or collections of essays that highlight the scholarship of teaching the long eighteenth century including the Romantic era. Proposals for edited volumes need not have firm commitments from authors at this stage, but should detail possible contributors and topics.

The long eighteenth century was a period of complex interest in the processes of learning and education, exploration of the natural and human-made world, and questions about who should be educated, in what manner, and for what purposes. Many of our ideas about pedagogical projects and processes have their roots in the period—for good or ill—and these same pedagogical questions drive our scholarship and vice versa. Ernest Boyer argued in 1990 for the value of the scholarship of teaching and learning: “The work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. … knowing and learning are communal acts. … great teachers create a common ground of intellectual commitment. They stimulate active, not passive learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning … (Scholarship Reconsidered, 23-24).

Thirty years later, in this moment of pandemic pedagogy and cultural reckoning, our methods of delivery, curriculum, and even parameters of expertise are all under pressure. It thus seems both timely and essential to ask how we teach the long eighteenth century now. The Transits series invite expressions of interest that recognize and represent teaching as a serious scholarly activity—one that bridges the sometimes solitary and reflective work of conventional scholarship with the more communal and communicative work of teaching and learning.

Essays might consider the connections rather than the disjunctions between the work of scholarship and the work of teaching; theories of pedagogy from the long eighteenth century and their implications or revisions for our own contexts; how we teach the eighteenth century—as the period in which academic institutions were born, the period of Enlightenment and the developing idea of human rights, but also the period that institutionalized settler colonialism and slavery. Work that engages critical pedagogical practices and pragmatic approaches as a way to think about the significance of the pedagogical act (rather than say how to teach a specific work or figure), are particularly welcomed. Interdisciplinary work or work that could be adapted into multiple fields would be of particular interest. We particularly welcome essays and collection proposals from junior faculty and contingent faculty, who often find themselves on the “frontlines” of teaching. Additionally, Transits and Bucknell University Press are deeply committed to the work of equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in solidarity with the Association of University Presses and instructors and scholars of color. We warmly welcome work that explores or exemplifies inclusive teaching practices.

We welcome expressions of interest or submissions as you are able; by October 30, 2020 for fullest consideration. https://www1.bucknell.edu/script/upress/series.asp?id=33

Kate Parker, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse (kparker@uwlax.edu) and Miriam L. Wallace, New College of Florida (mwallace@ncf.edu).

In honor of International Women’s Day, we wanted to take the time to highlight some of our incredible female authors.

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature
by Lenora Warren

Lenora Warren tells a new story about the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences of slavery and insurrection either inspired or found resonance within fiction: Olaudah Equiano, Denmark Vesey, Joseph Cinqué, Madison Washington, and Washington Goode. These stories of sailors, both real and fictional, reveal how the history of mutiny and insurrection is both shaped by, and resistant to, the prevailing abolitionist rhetoric surrounding the efficacy of armed rebellion as a response to slavery. Pairing well-known texts with lesser-known figures (Billy Budd and Washington Goode) and well-known figures with lesser-known texts (Denmark Vesey and the work of John Howison), this book reveals the richness of literary engagement with the politics of slave violence.

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives
by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio

On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses – Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates.

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
by Melissa Schoenberger

During the decades following the English civil wars, British poets seeking to make sense of lingering political instabilities turned to Virgil’s Georgics. This ancient poem betrays deep ambivalences about war, political power, and empire, and such poets as Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Anne Finch found in these attitudes valuable ways of responding to the uncertainties of their own time. Composed during a period of brutal conflict in Rome, Virgil’s agricultural poem distrusts easy stability, urging its readers to understand that lasting peace must be sowed, tended, reaped, and replanted, year after year. Like the ancient poet, who famously depicted a farmer’s scythe suddenly recast as a sword, the poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labor.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, eds.

Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views:  on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin’s passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin’s love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity
by Sharrell D. Luckett

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the Restoration to Jane Austen
by Marcie Frank

Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage.

The Art of Time: Levinas, Ethics, and the Contemporary Peninsular Novel
by Nina L. Molinaro

Ethics, or the systematized set of inquiries and responses to the question “what should I do?” has infused the history of human narrative for more than two centuries. One of the foremost theorists of ethics during the twentieth century, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) radicalized the discipline of philosophy by arguing that “the ethical” is the foundational moment for human subjectivity, and that human subjectivity underlies all of Western philosophy. Levinas’s voice is crucial to the resurging global attention to ethics because he grapples with the quintessential problem of alterity or “otherness,” which he conceptualizes as the articulation of, and prior responsibility to, difference in relation to the competing movement toward sameness.

Academicians and journalists in Spain and abroad have recently fastened on an emerging cluster of peninsular writers who, they argue, pertain to a discernible literary generation, provisionally referred to as Generación X. These writers are distinct from their predecessors; they and their literary texts are closely related to the specific socio-political and historical circumstances in Spain and their novels relate stories of more and less proximity, more and less responsibility, and more and less temporality. In short, they trace the temporal movement of alterity through narrative.

The Poetics of Epiphany in the Spanish Lyric of Today
by Judith Nantell

Drawing on the poetry of four major voices in the Spanish lyric of today, Judith Nantell explores the epistemic works of Luis Muñoz, Abraham Gragera, Josep M. Rodríguez, and Ada Salas, arguing that, for them, the poem is the fundamental means of exploring the nature of both knowledge and poetry. In this first interpretive analysis of the epistemic nature of their poetry, Nantell innovatively engages these poets, each of whom has contributed one of their own poems along with a previously unpublished explication of their chosen poem. Each also provides an original biographical sketch to support Nantell’s development of a poetics of epiphany.

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder
by Jennifer Smith

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts: Transnational Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century Greater Mexico
by Cara Anne Kinnally

Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts traces the existence of a now largely forgotten history of inter-American alliance-making, transnational community formation, and intercultural collaboration between Mexican and Anglo American elites. This communion between elites was often based upon Mexican elites’ own acceptance and reestablishment of problematic socioeconomic, cultural, and ethno-racial hierarchies that placed them above other groups—the poor, working class, indigenous, or Afro-Mexicans, for example—within their own larger community of Greater Mexico. Using close readings of literary texts, such as novels, diaries, letters, newspapers, political essays, and travel narratives produced by nineteenth-century writers from Greater Mexico, Forgotten Futures, Colonized Pasts brings to light the forgotten imaginings of how elite Mexicans and Mexican Americans defined themselves and their relationship with Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Anglo America in the nineteenth century. These “lost” discourses—long ago written out of official national narratives and discarded as unrealized or impossible avenues for identity and nation formation—reveal the rifts, fractures, violence, and internal colonizations that are a foundational, but little recognized, part of the history and culture of Greater Mexico.  

Frieda Ekotto is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and currently serves as the chair of the department of Afroamerican and African studies.  Her early work involves an interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions among philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema. Don’t Whisper Too Much was first published by French publishing house L’Harmattan in 2005, and was translated by Corine Tachtiris to make Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of A Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, published by Bucknell University Press in 2019. In February, I was allowed the privilege to ask Professor Ekotto a few of my own questions about her stunning works.

How do you begin a new work? What is your process for beginning a new project?

I would like to write all the time but it is impossible because of my work as a professor.  
Writing fiction is my solace. It really helps me on a daily basis. It is like reading. If I do not read a piece of a story every day, I feel like the world is empty. I have so many ideas, I want to put them down. Therefore, as soon as I have a little bit of time, I articulate an idea in order to come back to it for either a short story or a novel. Writing fiction allows my imagination to fly all around me.

These works were first published in French, and you’ve stated before that the publishing process for Don’t Whisper Too Much had its challenges.  What was that like, and what is your take on how the publishing industry should intersect with the lives and stories of underrepresented groups?

In the novel Don’t Whisper Too Much, I really wanted to talk about love between women. How women can love each other.  It is difficult to talk about love. We usually talk about stories on love and sacrifice in a visual poetry full of sensuality and emotion.  Aesthetically, I wanted to focus on the bodies, the loving body as such: the two main characters Affi and Siliki work on the different movement of the body, disabled body that moves very slowly, dreaming, thinking, loving, speaking and body escaping confinement of sexual body. This will allow me to work on the new framing of presenting the African female body: a different gaze, an African gaze as well as an aesthetic on slowness of the way these bodies move.  These two main characters move slowly with the focus on the face, on specific parts of the body, faces, eyes, private parts. In a closed door I wanted to show intimacy as well as spaces of resistances, an opening to escape confinement as well as conditions of possible freedom, which symbolize the openness, alterity and mostly tolerance. Aesthetically, I seek to invent a writing form to allow openness, possibilities, and forms of breathing necessary for freedom to be.  In other words, create a narrative that renders plausible form of objectivity, a poetic message, something purely fictional that would affect souls. Don’t Whisper Too Much traverses different life stories and histories, trajectories dealing with time and feelings of issues fear and desire.  The characters Affi and Siliki’s stories relate to suffering of many women as well as other humans with alternative voices.

Have the responses from your English readers differed in any way from your original audience?

Yes.  There is a tradition within the Anglo-Saxon world of already well-established homosexual writers. Here my inspiration is James Baldwin. His work is about love and this is what I want to reproduce within the continent of Africa. The translator of this work wrote an excellent article on the process of translating my work. See: Corine Tachtiris “Giving Voice: Translating Speech and Silence in Frieda Ekotto’s Don’t Whisper Too Much.” This piece is useful for teaching. My work is important because it is a different voice, a voice coming from another space. In general,  readers love to discover voices from far away like those coming from Africa. Our continent is a huge one with diversity of cultures and languages, therefore, I want to add my voice to the multiple voices defining ourselves, writing ourselves and our stories in world literature.

Why choose to have Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella together in a single volume?  How do they speak to one another?

Don’t Whisper Too Much is remarkable not just for being arguably the first African novel to deal frankly with women who love women but also in that it is very “non-confrontational” for a general African audience.  There is a lot of love, intimacy, and desire, but nothing that could be called pornographic or even overtly sexual. This was a conscious decision to gain traction with a wider, even more conservative audience. In these two novels, there is a stylistic continuation of what I can do in my work, a specific desire to take a different approach to representing women who love women in an African context. In any case, I think the content of these short stories and their raw power are completely different from the first novel. Yes, my ideas are inflammatory because I want readers to note that this is a different world.

Within the first few pages of Don’t Whisper Too Much, you write that “Silence permeates every relationship.”  In the introduction of Don’t Whisper Too Much, Lindsey Green-Simms claims that “Writing, then, allows Ekotto to carve out spaces within this confinement to ‘pierce the imperceptible layer of the unsayable and slide through the cracks.’”  What does this mean for you? How does silence affect your work?

As a postcolonial subject, silence is part of how we are in the world. My desire is to write in my mother’s tongue, but this is impossible, so I translate part of what I cannot say into silence. My major question is how to translate Other’s silence.  It is important for me that the voices of ‘Others’ be heard and not silenced by being squeezed into or ignored by so many dominant discourses or what Jean François Lyotard called “master narrative.” This means that our attempts to “explore the ‘Other’ point of view” and “to give it a chance to speak for itself” must always be distinguished from the other’s struggles.  In my case, this means that I speak from the position of a postcolonial subject and that my speech can be localized within the postcolonial context despite the logical inconsistencies propelling it. I also know, however, that it is necessary for me to first master my own language before attempting to appropriate the master’s discursive control over language. Derrida discusses the question of the other’s language in Racism’s Last Word,  pointing out that one must master how to “speak the other’s language without renouncing [our] own.” In other words, translating silence is like facing ‘a wall,’ therefore to speak or to learn how to speak means to find a hole and then the wall will tumble.  In fact, I am only reminding Africans that it is about time to learn how to speak, to find a hole for themselves, for their history to be heard. I am quite aware of the cultural implications for a silenced voice who seeks “to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for)” in this particular global context. But what is crucial to understand here is not that the silence cannot be translated, but instead, that we include the necessary conditions for its translation not to be “only” localizable in the same margins of its contestation of liminality and exclusion. Translating silence is also reformulating agency that not only resists, but one that traces the teleologies of an alternative, a kind of new culture. It is within this space that I can speak of how translation of silence engenders the inscription of my subjectivity. It is also not necessary to translate silence all the time because it is the condition for so many people. Silence protects me and I am always careful how I want to uncover it.

If readers were to take one thing away from your work, what would you want that to be?

I would be very happy if readers understood the humanity of my characters who are dealing with same-sex love. To tell a story is a creative component of human experience.

I strongly believe that literature or other forms of creativity can help change attitudes in the continent of Africa on queer identities. Same-sex desire and sexual relationships between women in Africa have received scant attention in critical and cultural studies. Thus it is extremely important that we examine how homosexuality is used as a discursive tool, both in Africa and in the West that affects lives. Films and literary texts shape ethical reflection and cultural norms.  I think it is extremely important to engage these materials, both to create new language and to expand our understanding of homosexuality beyond its current Western-oriented discourse. These cultural productions encourage and support women who love women to live in relationships of love, without fear of being killed, ostracized, disowned, or beaten. 

We need more writing and other art forms on homosexuality in the continent. The more we talk about it, show images, sing songs or music, produce paintings, etc. we encourage more people to see that it is about showing homosexuals as humans. Since I am speaking out as a woman who loves women, I consider myself a dissident in the continent. Again, my approach to the question of dissidence in Africa engages not only different ways of being female, but also different ways of being queer. 

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building: National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897–1940
Naida García-Crespo
“In this groundbreaking study, the author roams knowledgeably across the fields of history, political science, and sociology…. Highly recommended.”
– CHOICE

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, eds.
“There are more than a few delights (and surprises) to be had from the Bakhtin presented in these interviews . . . I recommend it highly.”
– Frank Farmer, University of Kansas; The Russian Review (Vol. 79, No. 1)

Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650-1750
by Melissa Schoenberger
“Schoenberger’s capable and closely argued book presents an innovative reading of the Virgilian Georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century…This is a well written and cogently argued book that should be welcomed for its refreshingly new reading of the Virgilian georgic mode in English poetry of the long eighteenth century. Its strengths are many, not least, its juxtaposition of close reading with a keen sensitivity to social and political contexts.”
– The Review of English Studies, 2019

“Cultivating Peace is a compelling account of Restoration and eighteenth-century engagements with Virgil’s Georgics and with that poem’s cautious attitude toward the promise of an Augustan golden age.”
– Marvell Studies, 4.2

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella
by Frieda Ekotto
Translated by Corine Tachtiris
“For the first time, two of Frieda Ekotto’s most remarkable works are being translated and bound into one volume . . . Ekotto masterfully illustrates the complex layers of African women-loving-women, which include patriarchy, violence, agency and colonialism.”
-Ms., December 2019

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature
by Lenora Warren
“In making her argument the author marries familiar texts—such as Oloudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frederick Douglass’s novella “The Heroic Slave” (1852), and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (begun in the 1880s; first published posthumously in 1924)—and some not so familiar (e.g., John Howison’s popular and much-reprinted story “The Florida Pirates,” published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1821) and their historical context, subjecting the narratives to subtle and extensive analysis….Recommended.” 
– CHOICE, February 2020

“Fire on the Water offers a necessary reckoning with the persistent failure of the abolitionist imagination to conceive of slave insurrection as an expression of political agency and not simply as a reaction to the brutalities of the slave trade and of slave society. . . . Readers will find Fire on the Water an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolitionism. . . . Moreover, this book also makes major contributions to Black Atlantic studies and to maritime and oceanic studies at large. . . . Scholars working in these fields will find Warren’s book essential reading. They will also find the book’s clarity and concision impressive.”
– American Literary History

Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels  
by Earl E. Fitz
“Steeped in the works of Western literature and an imaginative reader of French Symbolist poetry, Machado creates, between 1880 and 1908, a “new narrative,” one that will presage the groundbreaking theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure by showing how even the language of narrative cannot escape being elusive and ambiguous in terms of meaning . . . A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity, “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels” is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of a prefacing article (A Note on Translations), sixteen pages of Notes, a six page Bibliography, and a seven page Index. While unreservedly recommended for college and university library Latin American Literary Studies collections in general, and Machado de Assis supplemental studies lists in particular, it should be noted for students, academia, and non- specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory” is also available in a paperback edition and in a digital book format.”
– Midwest Book Review 

“Indeed, the rhythm of the novel alternates continually between self-analysis and depiction of exterior realities. It might remind us of a scenic drive, where we enjoy a rich variety of natural sights, but feel the need to stop from time to time to clean our specs. For this reason, Earl Fitz’s book should be appreciated as a complement to the many other excellent studies of Machado’s relation to a plentiful external landscape. Lest we become overly confident about our ability to know these realities, we should pause and, considering perspectives like those of this book, clean our glasses.”
– Journal of Lusophone Studies 4.2

Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives
by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio
“Saggini and Soccio’s [book] defies expectations and has a great deal to say about the pedagogical uses to which Frankenstein’s textual afterlives might be put…. Many of the essays in this volume, although they don’t define themselves that way, might be characterized by what we now call presentist in that they trace how cultural forebodings about the dangers of difference that preoccupy the novel get re-mediated in contemporary culture to address those same concerns…. All of these essays are never less than illuminating, in their varied ways, on some understudied or overlooked aspect of the novel’s afterlives, as should be obvious from the book’s title but is never a given.”
-European Romantic Review, 31:1  

Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges
by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus
“A unique and often fascinating volume, Cy-Borges positions Borges as a precursor to “posthumanism,” a postmodern approach to the humanities that decenters autonomy and free will, and examines human beings as limited organisms enmeshed in networks of interlocking forces such as history, culture, technology, and biology.”
-Shipwreck Library, January 2020 

Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy
by Tara Prescott
“Prescott’s Poetic Salvage wants to ease the agitation of Loy’s audience, to offer, wherever possible, ‘an in-depth exploration of Loy’s imaginary words and worlds’…Ultimately, it is precisely because of this established, celebrated lineage of close reading that Prescott can be certain that her work is a welcome addition to Loy studies, as it assuredly is.”
-Modern Language Review, Vol. 115, Part I, 2020  

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain
by Declan Kavanagh
“What is striking throughout Effeminate Years is the sheer flexibility and
availability of the rhetoric of effeminacy. Kavanagh’s detailed, in-depth
literary analysis of what is, at times, a densely complex political discourse convincingly demonstrates the importance of antieffeminacy and homophobia to that discourse.”
– Journal of the History of Sexuality 

Jane Austen and Masculinity
by Michael Kramp
“Jane Austen and Masculinity is a welcome addition to the significant
body of work on Austen and gender…The collected essays therefore exhibit a self-conscious awareness of disciplinary developments, and the analytical frameworks and tools therein reflect those of influential predecessors.”
-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32, no. 2.

The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism Out of Place
by Katherine Bergren 
“Beautifully written, equally attentive to Romanticism and its afterlives, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism and its legacies, whether scholarly or general readers. It offers a genuinely original perspective on Wordsworth and his works, without insisting on the privilege of canonicity.”
-Review 19

Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero
by Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing
“The range and variety of the entries in this collection will please and surprise seasoned Don Quixote scholars as well as anyone interested in the novel…The book is both a pleasure and a revelation.”
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 4

“The 17 essays in this volume, which also includes an introduction by Gratchev (Marshall Univ.) and Mancing (Purdue Univ.), take as their point of departure the concept of re-accentuation, initially proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1975; Eng. tr., 1981). The interpretive and analytical openness of key works of prose fiction allow for re-reading and re-imagination in subsequent ages and through different media and approaches…The essays are intriguing in their range and methodologies, and they become testaments to the afterlife—what Bakhtin termed the “unfinalizability”—of Don Quixote in both public and artistic spheres.”
– E. H. Friedman, Vanderbilt University; CHOICE, 55.9 (May 2018)

Rewriting Franco’s Spain: Marcel Proust and the Dissident Novelists of Memory
by Samuel O’Donoghue
“In this engaging and illuminating study, O’Donoghue proves that despite the willed insularity of the Francoist cultural establishment Marcel Proust was well known in Spain, even before the Civil War, and had a deep, significant impact on many major writers who excelled exploring memory and self-writing…All in all, this is a superb book, clearly written, well organized and with a lively critical voice that makes it a pleasure to read.” 
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 4

Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama: Performance of History, Performance of Space
by Elena García-Martín
“Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama is a well-written and innovative book that demonstrates an impressive breadth of research. Its interdisciplinary focus appeals to a diverse readership. The author merits much praise for the adept and engaging way in which she challenges the reader to reconsider Spain’s Golden-Age theatrical tradition and its role in society today.”
– Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCVI, No. 3

Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing
by Regina Galasso & Evelyn Scaramella
“…this very unique collection allows the reader to appreciate the richness of
translating Iberian and Latin American writers’ urban centers. Indeed, this
collection sheds new light on translations that are only possible in cities while also uncovering how Latin American and Iberian influencers have transformed urban spaces by leaving their own cultural and historical marks. Scholars of Iberian, Latin American, and Translation studies will gladly add this outstanding collection of essays to their list of must-read books.”
-Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 43

Uniting Blacks in a Raceless Nation: Blackness, AfroCuban Culture and Mestizaje in the Prose and Poetry of Nicolás Guillén
by Miguel Arnedo-Gómez
“From the outset, it is clear that the book is very thoroughly researched, and
that Arnedo-Gómez’s argument is firmly established within a suitable theoretical context…Overall, this book offers a very original perspective on Guillén’s work…Arnedo-Gómez is clearly an expert on the topic and his desire to fill an apparent void in the scholarship on the poet is commendable.”
-Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 43

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France
by Christopher Semk
“…beautifully thought-out, displays effortless erudition, and has much to offer any scholar or student interested in literature, religion, or the interplay of both. Playing the Martyr is an accomplished study, liberally peppered with well-chosen and pertinent anecdotes and observations, managing to maintain that elusive balance of erudition and readability…Christopher Semk’s book is a welcome contribution to this field and proves that researchers should not overlook, nor overgeneralize, this window into the early modern period.” 
– H-France Review, June 2018

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650-1850
by Kristina Booker
“Kristina Booker’s Menials is an ambitious and solidly argued exploration of
the place of servants in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British
imagination. If it does not quite articulate the transformation of British society, as maintained by the subtitle, it certainly demonstrates one of the ways the British understood their culture differently over time…Booker is ultimately concerned with the ways that what she calls the “master class” maps its anxieties and concerns onto servants, both in fiction and in philosophical and political texts, as well as in the conduct literature that deals with the “servant problem.” In her view, the master class demonstrates its grip on the representation of servants, leaving little room for any signs of working-class identity or independence. Those signs, she believes, are quickly extinguished. This pessimistic view, which assumes a certain uniformity among the authors, derives in part from Booker’s use of economic perspectives; she reads literary servants in light of a trio of economic principles: self-interest, emulation, and consumption…Menials contributes substantially to the ongoing discussion of domestic servants in history and in literature. It has a strongly articulated and definitive point of view that will make it worth arguing with as well as building on.”
– Early Modern Women, Spring 2019, Vol.13, No. 2

“Booker has composed a tightly organized and argued account wherein each text is deployed in support of a neatly stated overall thesis. She has found an effective means of tracing critical cultural arguments over a long period of change, and has worked hard to isolate key themes and connect them with emblematic sources. There are no loose ends.”
– David Vincent, The Open University; Victorian Studies (61.4)

“As a new entry into this undertreated line of critical inquiry, Booker’s 2018 monograph represents a generative step forward. Well researched, accessible, and keenly incisive, Booker interweaves cultural critique and literary interpretation in an expressly cogent and provocative read…I find Menials a truly valuable and original contribution to the field. Kristina Booker is a fine writer and scholar, and her book should spark fresh conversations, both in print and in the classroom, to the profit of specialists and students alike.”  
-The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, October 2019

Jane Austen and Masculinity 
by Michael Kramp
“This book provides thoughtful variety in its views of men and masculinity associated with Austen’s novels, all the richer for its broader considerations of contexts and aftereffects of Austen’s men.”
-The Eighteenth Century Intelligencer, October 2019

Reading Homer’s Odyssey
by Kostas Myrsiades
“The book is a great pleasure to read….Reading Homer’s Odyssey is a book that does exactly what it promises: it helps its reader to read (and understand) the Odyssey. It will appeal to a broad readership as well as to scholars and students of Classics and other fields, and it may also be suggested as accompanying reading in Classical Civilization classes or similar courses”
-Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2019

Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle
by Anthony W. Lee
“Expertly compiled and deftly edited by Anthony W. Lee, “Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle” is a collection of ten essays that explores relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries…In their detailed and careful examination of particular works situated within complex social and personal contexts, the essays in this volume offer a “thick” and illuminating description of Johnson’s world that also engages with larger cultural and aesthetic issues, such as intertextuality, literary celebrity, narrative, the nature of criticism, race, slavery, and sensibility…An invaluable, erudite, thoughtful and thought provoking contribution to the study of Samuel Johnson’s life, philosophy, and literary work, “Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson’s Circle” is an extraordinary body of informative and deftly scripted scholarship.”
-Midwest Book Review

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British
Society, 1650–1850
by Kristina Booker
“Booker is ultimately concerned with the ways that what she calls the “master class” maps its anxieties and concerns onto servants, both in fiction and in philosophical and political texts, as well as in the conduct literature that deals with the “servant problem.” In her view, the master class demonstrates its grip on the representation of servants, leaving little room for any signs of working-class identity or independence. Those signs, she believes, are quickly extinguished. This pessimistic view, which assumes a certain uniformity among the authors, derives in part from Booker’s use of economic perspectives; she reads literary servants in light of a trio of economic principles: self-interest, emulation, and consumption…Menials contributes substantially to the ongoing discussion of domestic servants in history and in literature. It has a strongly articulated and definitive point of view that will make it worth arguing with as well as building on.”
-Early Modern Women, Spring 2019, Vol.13, No. 2

Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels
by Earl E. Fitz
“A masterwork of original and seminal scholarship that rescues a critically important Latin American writer from an undeserved obscurity, “Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels” is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of a prefacing article (A Note on Translations), sixteen pages of Notes, a six page Bibliography, and a seven page Index…unreservedly recommended for college and university library Latin American Literary Studies collections in general, and Machado de Assis supplemental studies lists in particular.”
-Midwest Book Review 

Jane Austen and Comedy
Edited by Erin Goss
“This collection addresses a surprising lacuna in Austen studies: the relationship between her works and comedy…Their topics—respectively, Austen’s problematic ‘happy endings,’ her farcical treatment of the uncomfortable paternalism of General Tilney and Mr. Bennett, and her oddly illuminating presence in ‘monster mashup’ titles—will prove most useful in the classroom. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.”
-CHOICE, September 2019 Vol. 57 No. 1

Beyond Human: Vital Materialisms in the Andean Avant-Gardes
by Tara Daly 
“The author explains political ramifications using specific historical events illuminated by postmodern philosophical insights. All in all, the book offers an interesting explanation of the avant-garde’s powerful impact on the Andean region, pointing to productive affinities between the experience of indigenous traditions and the impulse to reject Western society. Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.”
-CHOICE, August 2019 Vol. 56 No. 12

Pretexts for Writing: German Romantic Prefaces, Literature, and Philosophy
by Seán M. Williams 
“Including excellent endnotes and an extensive bibliography, this challenging study proves that prefaces are far from perfunctory and challenges readers to reevaluate this neglected form. Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students.”
-CHOICE, July 2019 Vol. 56 No. 11

Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain 
by Declan Kavanagh
“Though a less erotic take on gender and sexuality, Declan Kavanagh’s Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain is a thoroughly modern analysis of the homosexual and homosocial legacy of the Seven Years War. Evoking Murray Pittock, Kavanagh stresses the difference between an effeminate landscape and a feminized one, staking a provocative claim for a characterization of the Celtic body politic which is both queer and male. Kavanagh’s argument is drawn along lines of public and private life: the politicization of homoerotic activity draws it into the public sphere, crystallizing anti-effeminate hostility, persecuting those found to be lacking in masculinity, and making the performance of gender a question of democracy.”
-The Year’s Work in English Studies

Reading Homer’s Odyssey
by Kostas Myrsiades
“Reading Homer’s Odyssey by Kostas Myrsiades offers a book-by-book commentary on the epic’s themes that informs the non-specialist general reader and engages the seasoned academic reader in new perspectives… An eloquently erudite and insightful analysis of one of the world’s most famous works of literature from Ancient Greece, Reading Homer’s Odyssey should be considered a core addition to both community and academic library Homeric Literature collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.”
-Midwest Book Review 

“Myrsiades has written an extremely readable companion to Homer’s Odyssey… Careful discussions of the plot’s structure, the characters’ development, and Homer’s narrative resources illuminate the Odyssey’s poetic charm. An ample, up-to-date list for further reading is provided for each book of the poem, with a general bibliography at the end…Myrsiades’s book will be most useful for those encountering the Odyssey for the first time, though seasoned readers may also learn from it. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.”
-CHOICE, September 2019 Vol. 57 No. 1

The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism Out of Place
by Katherine Bergren
“A model of academic excellent, this literary study of William Wordsworth upon various cultures around the world is an extraordinarily informative and thought-provoking read.” 
-Midwest Book Review 

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France
By Christopher Semk
“Playing the Martyr is an accomplished study, liberally peppered with well-chosen and pertinent anecdotes and observations, managing to maintain that elusive balance of erudition and readability…The topic of martyrs, or more broadly hagiographic literature, has interested scholars for a couple of decades, giving rise to fresh readings of individual plays, authors, or saints. Christopher Semk’s book is a welcome contribution to this field and proves that researchers should not overlook, nor overgeneralize, this window into the early modern period.”
-Paul Scott, University of Kansas; H-France Review (18.132), June 2018

The Ladies of Llangollen: Desire, Indeterminacy, and the Legacies of Criticism
By Fiona Brideoake
“Reading this book is a delight. Brideoake deftly deflects certainty, enjoyably poking holes in centuries of scholarship and speculation. She is self-aware, noting that the desire to set aside a determination is a reaction to those same centuries of fruitless recontextualizing, reflecting a rhetorical turn away from defining subsets of queerness by what goes on behind closed doors…This is a long overdue contribution to the scholarly record, challenging first and foremost Elizabeth Mavor’s landmark 1971 biography, which positioned the Ladies as “romantic friends” who remained chaste. Brideoake’s readings of both early-life documents (chapter 1) and mythologizing texts published near the time of the Ladies’ deaths (chapter 7) are unparalleled elsewhere…It would be a value purchase for anyone invested in queer, feminist, or class history.”
-Allana Mayer, graduate of the Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) program (2014) from McGill University; Eighteenth-Century Fiction (30.4), 2018

Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen
By Jocelyn Harris
“Burney scholars will find Jocelyn Harris’s latest book Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen an enriching read…Considering the fact that Frances Burney and other members of the Burney family feature prominently in [Austen’s] allusions, [Harris’] book, by extension, sheds new light on the cultural influence of the Burneys on their contemporaries…the book gives shape to an Austen who was an avid and grateful consumer of the latest gossip, scandals and satirical prints about those from whom she was never far removed: famous writers, intellectuals and actresses, big naval figures, the royal family. With a keen eye for detail, Harris exposes the subtle connections between the unrestrained, public laughter surrounding such figures and the more restricted, oblique laughter in the novels, thereby deepening our understanding of Austen’s skill for satire in the process.”
-Elles Smallegoor; Burney Letter, The Burney Society, Spring 2018 (24.1)

“Harris’s impressive new book, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (2017), builds on the work of her pioneering 1989 study, deepening our sense of what Austen may have been up to in crafting her novels… For readers willing to engage with the possible, and to consider links that do not, at first glance, seem probable, Harris’s well-written, deeply researched, and timely book has a great deal to offer… Harris’s arguments are highly illuminating. For years to come, readers and critics will be weighing the massive number of new insights in this book, troubling through their implications for our future readings of Austen, politics, history, and popular culture.”
-Devoney Looser, Arizona State University; The Review of English Studies

Memory, War and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women
By Sarah Leggott
“In recent years, memory has come to the fore of Spanish cultural studies, inspiring a plethora of articles, conferences and books. Sarah Leggott’s oeuvre focuses on the gendered dimensions of the concepts that have dominated Spanish memory studies, such as post-memory and Republican memory, while also reconceiving the traditionally feminist subjects of the mother-daughter relationship and the absent mother as important vectors of memory transmission…This book is a welcome and original addition to the burgeoning field of memory studies, and would be suitable for college-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It would be of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of Hispanic gender and memory studies.”
-Lorraine Ryan, University of Birmingham; Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCV, No. 1 (2018)

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas
By Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta
“Anonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta has taken the field of inter-American studies in his own direction. Pioneered by Earl Fitz, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Nina Scott, Elizabeth Lowe, and Sophia McClennen (to name only a few), this approach unites the Americas through the comparative method…Tosta’s prose is clear, engaging, and jargon-free. Any class or study on inter-American literature could use this book, but also any study of authors and populations that were treated in isolation before (Japanese and African Americans) would benefit from this well-researched, fascinating, and interdisciplinary work of multicultural scholarship.”
– John Maddox, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 54, No. 4 (2017)

Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography
Ed. by Rebecca Shapiro
“Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography, edited by Rebecca Shapiro, offers an invaluable collection of the explanatory front matter written by dictionary authors from the early seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. This unique collation, beautifully edited with instructive commentary, enables readers to grasp the shifting dynamic of descriptive and prescriptive elements used by lexicographers in documenting the ever-widening scope of English language use in the documented time frame.”
– Lowell Gallagher, University of California, Los Angeles; SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 58, No. 1 (Winter 2018)

Hi! My name is Emily and I am currently a senior majoring in Literary Studies and Creative Writing.  After interning with the literary magazine on campus, West Branch, I realized that I am fascinated with all of the detail and hard work that goes into putting a book out into the world, and I am lucky to say that my last semester here on campus is going to be spent with the Bucknell University Press.  

As most book-lovers would say, books have had an enormous impact on my life.  Regardless of genre or audience, books are how we spread knowledge and empathy in our world, and I’ve always wanted to take some part in that creation process.  I want to pursue a career in publishing once I graduate in May, but for now I indulge myself by reviewing and talking about books on my blog. I also write poetry and fiction in my spare time, and would love to publish a book or two at some point in my life.

Some of my favorite books recently have been Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. When not reading, I consume a shameful amount of podcasts.

Guest blogger Jason S. Farr, of Marquette University, concludes University Press Week with his profound and personal post on disability and perception.

When I was 29, I suddenly found myself struggling to hear professors speak in the graduate seminars I attended. Conversations with friends and classmates became minefields of misunderstanding and sources of frustration. My physician referred me to an audiologist for a hearing test. She sat me in a dark booth and placed heavy headphones over my ears. Alone and filled with anxiety, I went on to fail an impossible test: somewhat discernible beeps followed by faint beeps followed by silence and the ringing oblivion of my tinnitus. The audiologist showed me the exam’s results, a line graph which plummeted at the mid-to-high frequencies. The diagnosis shocked me: I was severely hearing impaired.

The audiologist advised me to purchase behind-the-ear hearing aids but I opted for the completely-in-canal ones because they were less visible. They would require more repairs and would be uncomfortable to wear, she warned me, but I was ashamed. To have a visible indication of diminished capacity was unthinkable to me at the time. In retrospect, I wasn’t just confronting profound cognitive disorientation due to the mechanized, digital soundscapes I was learning to process; I was reconciling myself to how people reacted when they noticed the hearing aids themselves. The question that I came to dread in casual conversation was “what happened to you?” which may as well have been, “what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you able-bodied?” For a young man navigating the body-driven subculture of gay San Diego, hearing aids called attention to my disability, and disability was something I regarded as compromising the body I was building in the gym and on basketball courts. Coming out as gay seven years prior to all of this was grueling, but coming out as disabled offered an entirely new set of challenges. In many ways, claiming my disability was even more difficult than claiming my gayness because of how deeply embedded and unchecked ableism is in our social and medical systems.

In the face of all this, I continued through the PhD program in Literature at UC San Diego where I would soon become acquainted with disability studies. One of my professors, Michael Davidson, introduced me to this vibrant interdisciplinary field and, consequently, to new ways of thinking about myself and others. In disability studies, for instance, disability is conceived of as a social and cultural phenomenon, not merely a physical one. Disabled people are often regarded as defective. But by reading disability activists and scholars, I soon learned that disabled people are manifestations of biological and cultural diversity, impaired perhaps in our bodies and minds but ultimately constrained by the communities we navigate, by the systems of thought to which we are exposed, and even by language itself, which reinforces ableism with clichéd metaphors of blindness-as-ignorance, of deafness-as-obtuseness, and of crippling-as-inhibiting.

When it came time for me to write my dissertation, I turned to disability studies to help me understand how literature reimagines social and political structures. I began by writing about Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762. Scott’s utopian novel depicts a British country estate run by variably-embodied women whose utter abhorrence of heterosexuality and patriarchy is matched in intensity only by their boundless love for each other. Curiously, all of the servants of the estate, and the inhabitants that live within the estate’s walls, are what we would today call disabled—deaf, blind, maimed, short-statured, neuroatypical, and so on. What I eventually realized was that, in writing queer and disabled bodies into her narrative, Scott imagines a social order that remedies the wrongs of her day. In Scott’s utopian reckoning, variable bodies and queer intimacy work together to reform a society that prizes freak shows and treats women as property.

The book that eventually came out of my dissertation and which was recently published with Bucknell University Press, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, is the culmination of years of research and rewriting. It argues that Scott’s novel and other fictional narratives from the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which ableism and homophobia govern social life, but it also shows that, through the disabled and queer bodies that they imagine, authors opened up new avenues of lived experience for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

Much like the fictional characters in the novels I write about, becoming disabled has enabled me to perceive myself and the world differently. It helps me to discern more acutely the plights of the people who compose the communities I inhabit. It spurs me to try to improve these communities in my own imperfect and limited ways. I don’t want to downplay the exhaustion I feel at the end of classes and office hours, after listening as attentively as possible to the ideas, questions, and concerns of students and colleagues. But I’m also motivated and energized by my impairment. Like the fictional characters of eighteenth-century novels, my body is novel, it is extraordinary, and it is rewriting the script that was designed for me. My hearing is unwieldy, to be sure, but it is also directing me toward new social landscapes whose expansive vistas I am only just beginning to perceive.